Today we are bringing you the 15 best collaboration tools for event planning! As an event planner, you’re juggling a dozen or more balls. You’re dealing with vendors, speakers, performers, caterers, marketers, the media, you name it. And your trusty notebook is filled to the brim with scribbled notes.
There must be an easier way, right?
Good news: There is. These collaboration tools for event planning are based in the cloud and help you stay organized and in touch even if you’re running around.
The Adobe Creative Cloud is a suite of well-known creative apps, including Photoshop and InDesign. It allows teams to share assets (fonts, images, colors) and collaborate on documents. If you have multiple people working on marketing materials for your event, the Creative Cloud is one of the best collaboration tools for event planning.
Airtable is a spreadsheet app with a twist: Each cell, here called a “record,” can be expanded and fully customized with due dates, attachments, labels, and more. Even better, you can link “records” to each other and create multiple “views” that sort and filter the records according to the criteria you choose. There are also Kanban and calendar view options.
Airtable is an excellent collaboration tool for event planning and resource for event managers who need to track attendees, press releases, or marketing materials. We use this app to track our repurposed content and clips and so much more! The app even includes an Event Planning template that allows you to build the schedule and keep track of staff, sponsors, and budget, as shown below.
Asana is a robust project management app that’s perfect for those who regularly plan events. It allows you to create multiple projects in either List or Board views, then list tasks with subtasks, tags, and attachments. Event planners can “hack” Asana by listing speakers, performers, vendors, etc as “tasks” and attaching their contracts, promo photos, and so on to the task.
As an event planner, you likely need to send a range of materials to your marketing team, vendors, sponsors, and everyone else involved with the event. Wouldn’t it be great to know exactly who downloads the schedule PDF or reviewed the brand guide? Enter Bit.ai, which allows you to keep important docs and track engagement with them.
Event planning details tend to get lost in group texts and endless Facebook messenger threads. Why not give Brief a try? It lets you sort your conversations into hubs, share files, and even turn messages into tasks. If you need to get your team on the same page, Brief is a great option.
If your team is squared away and it’s the vendors, performers, or sponsors you need to wrangle, consider bringing them to Chanty. It allows you to sort conversations by “channels” and quickly share files. Plus, it offers predictive typing! That will free up some time for you to focus on event planning.
If you’re an event planner, you’ve probably used Dropbox to view or send large files, such as poster PDFs. Did you know it’s also a great way to gather feedback on documents and provide a centralized location for schedules, contracts, and marketing materials? Plus, it’sits Paper feature offers document templates and meeting notes.
Dropbox is also a great way to organize project files and send them to clients for review.
If you’re an avid note-taker, you should be using Evernote. It’s a great collaboration tool for event planning because it allows you to sort notes into different notebooks and adjust sharing permissions for each notebook (for example, you could have a marketing notebook, sponsors notebook, etc.). You can also set reminders on notes and attach PDFs and images.
Google Docs’ major power is that you and your team can edit documents simultaneously. If you’re hashing out an event schedule or promotional copy under deadline, this is a massive advantage. Plus, it integrates with Google Calendar and Google Keep, so you can keep all your planning sessions and meeting notes close at hand.
Google Drive is Google’s answer to Dropbox. If you’re using Docs, you’re already using Drive, because that’s where it stores the Docs. However, did you know that you can also upload and share almost any sort of document from Drive? If you need to share different sorts of documents with your vendors, speakers, and sponsors, Drive allows you to set custom-sharing options for your various folders.
If you’re a fan of sticky notes but need to be on-the-go, Google Keep is perfect for you. Color code your thoughts (blue for marketing, green for sponsors?), add drawings (table layouts, perhaps?), tags, and links, and assign reminders. If your note gets too large, never fear, you can convert it into a Google doc.
If you’re planning an event that has speakers or vendors coming in from around the world and you need to host conference calls, do it in style with GoToMeeting. You can even share your screen and “draw” on it, which is great for sharing showroom layouts or vendor maps, for example. Plus, you can record and store the meetings for people who come on board later.
If you need to plan things out visually or want the ability to create interactive event maps or flowcharts, look no further than MindMeister. You can map out ideas, color-code the nodes and attach links, images, icons.
Like Chanty, Slack is primarily a chat app, so it’s great for getting your event planning team on the same page making it a strong event planning collaboration tool. You can also create channels that only your sponsors or vendors can access, which is immensely useful. Slack is also very good at sharing super-large files and letting people watch videos in-house. Slack is also great for remote teams, we use this to communicate daily with out remote team!
Trello is a Kanban-style app that shows items as “cards” that you can move around on a “board.” Trello has a lot of powerful tools for event planners, such as the ability to attach documents, file-storage links, and checklists to any card. Anyone added to the board can comment on or “vote for” cards, which makes it a great way to keep in touch with your event planning team, sponsors, or vendors.
If you’re an event planner, you need cloud-based, easily accessed notes, files, and tasks, as well as an effective means of touching base with everyone involved with the event. These tools can help you achieve that, and most of them are completely free. What is your favorite collaboration tools for event planning? Let us know and we might add it in!
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